Further: Beyond the Threshold (32 page)

This was a drilling platform the size of a small city. And this enormous valley was one gigantic strip mine.

The Iron Mass had been on the pulsar planet for some time, it was clear. And they had been busy.

A lift in the central post carried us up, where our captors ushered us into a cramped, darkly lit room, which I assumed was located in the dome atop the platform. The others and I kept our mantles in complete extension, covering our whole bodies, but once we were inside the pressurized dome, the Iron Mass began to remove their black insect suits, keeping watch over us in shifts.

I got my first glimpse of an Iron Mass, and it was a sight I won’t soon forget.

The Anachronists with poor taste who’d impersonated the Iron Mass at the
Further
reception had gotten no nearer the mark with those re-creations than the zoot suiters had gotten to 20C clothing. They had been cartoons, broad caricatures, but seeing the real thing was something else entirely. The Anachronists had seemed faintly silly with their black skin and horns. But seeing the Iron Mass, their hair engineered to grow into a series of small horns from their foreheads to the napes of their neck, like cornrows of rhino’s horns, their skin coded jet black to make them more resistant to radiation, the effect was quite arresting.

The Iron Mass were anthropoids like Jida and me, but deeply engineered. They had spurs growing from their knuckles, and one on each elbow, doubtless for use as weapons. And when they blinked, a third inner eyelid slid momentarily over their catlike piercing blue eyes, a nictitating membrane. They were surprisingly short and compact, the tallest of them coming roughly to my chin, the shortest several centimeters shorter than Jida. But they were broad shouldered and thickly muscled, with no hint of body fat. These were stripped-down, streamlined biological machines designed for survival.

The Iron Mass believe that evolution will one day produce God, whom they call the “Divine Ideal.” If the Iron Mass’s morphology is any kind of indication of what their God will look like, I’m in no hurry to see Him for myself.

Our captors had hardly spoken to us since we left the cairn forest, but once they’d all gotten out of their pressure suits, dressed now in high black boots, loose-fitting white trousers, and sleeveless white tunics, their leader turned once more to address us. She was a woman, as it happened, but there was little that seemed feminine about her.

“You!” She pointed at us, her finger tipped with a talon-like nail. “You will to remove protective.”

Our interlinks had managed to compile a workable lexicon of Iron Mass words, but were still struggling with syntax and usage.

::Captain?:: Zaslow sounded as uncertain as I felt.

::Hold on, crew,:: I said. ::Let’s see where this goes.::

“Remove protective clothing,” the Iron Mass woman repeated, her piercing blue eyes flashing. “Now!”

The others glanced at me, and I faced the woman and said, “We’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

Our mantles were our only defense, the only thing standing between us and the points of the Iron Mass’s spears, and I wasn’t about to give them up.

The woman shook her head angrily and motioned to one of the other Iron Mass. “Bring it!”

Two of the Iron Mass hurried out of the room, leaving the others and me to exchange confused glances. In a moment, they returned, carrying a large cylindrical mechanism of some sort, like a bazooka with a battery pack strapped to it.

“You will remove your protective clothing,” the woman said, her lips pulled back over pointed teeth, “or suffer consequence.”

I glanced at Jida. “I think that we’re still—”

“Fire!” the woman shouted, and a gout of light leapt from the end of the cylinder, hitting Zaslow squarely in the chest, blasting through his mantle, through his chest, finally shimmering on the wall behind him.

The planetary scientist looked down at the gaping hole in his chest, circuitry and biological visceral incinerated in an eyeblink.

:: Zaslow!:: I shouted.

“Oh…” he said, and then collapsed in a heap on the ground—dead.

The woman motioned, and the cylinder was swung around and pointed at my chest now.

“You will remove your protective clothing.”

It didn’t make much sense to argue.

The three of us—Jida, Bin-Ney, and me—were marched through narrow corridors to an even smaller room, dimly lit by a strip of some green luminescence on the floor. We were shoved unceremoniously through the hatch, which was then shut behind us, closing with a resounding clang.

Zaslow was dead. And all I’d ever really known about him was his name. If I’d been quicker on my feet, if I’d been faster with a response, would he still be alive?

I swallowed hard. There’d be time for self-recrimination later, if I were lucky. For now, I had the surviving members of the team to worry about—let the dead worry about themselves, for the time being.

“Are you two all right?” I asked, looking to the others.

Bin-Ney nodded, but Jida kept silent, her attention fixed on the hatch, her hands clutching at her throat.

“Jida, are you hurt?” I asked.

She turned to me, as though startled to hear her name, and for a moment, she stared at me with blank confusion. Then she slowly lowered her hands and shook her head. “No, I’m not hurt. But I’m afraid we’re all far from all right.”

“I was still in my original incarnation,” Jida said, her voice sounding small and faraway in the dimly lit room, “with only a handful of bodies comprising my legion, when the Iron Mass was sealed off forever from the Entelechy. It’s been more than five thousand years since any of us last had contact with them, but that clearly wasn’t long enough.”

“What can you tell me about them, Jida?” I asked. “They’re some sort of religious zealots, right? They believe in a supernatural creator?”

Jida shook her head. “The deity of the Iron Mass, which they call the ‘Divine Ideal,’ is not the creator, but rather, the created. The universe, the Iron Mass believes, is evolving into a unified consciousness, and all life that has ever arisen in the universe is a part of that process. The symbol of the Iron Mass is the triumvir—three interlocking circles within an equilateral triangle, representing mind, body, and soul—and all individuals bear a responsibility, which the Iron Mass calls the ‘great effort,’ to improve themselves on all three axes, to help give rise to the Divine Ideal. However, the Iron Mass believe that if any of the three aspects of being are neglected, it is an offense to their deity. So an uploaded consciousness represents the reduction of body and soul in the interest of preserving the mind, while an artificial intelligence is a perversion of the three. The Iron Mass have no objection to genetic engineering, which they consider a vital aspect of the Divine Ideal’s development, just as much as is evolution and procreation, but they reject anti-senescence, believing that aging and death are a necessary aspect of being.”

“Wait,” Bin-Ney said, disbelieving. “They let themselves
age
?”

Jida nodded. In the low light, I could see her shooting a hard look at Bin-Ney. I knew she was remembering the time only a few days before when Bin-Ney had disguised himself as an Iron Mass as a re-creationist game. But I doubted that Bin-Ney thought history quite so romantic, quite so worthy of idealized re-creation, when staring it right in the face.

“For centuries,” Jida went on, “the Iron Mass were considered little more than cranks, more or less harmless with their strange notions. And since their beliefs were all inwardly directed, concerned with their own bodies and minds, they posed no nuisance to their neighbors. But then a charismatic leader arose from among their ranks who came to be known as ‘Scourge of the Divine Ideal and Unconquered Master of the Infinite Worlds, Lord-of-the-Fortunate-Conjunctions Zero Perihelion Iridium.’ It was said that he’d been born with blood filling his palms, a sign that blood would be shed by his hand.”

Jida paused and looked down at the palms of her hands, her thoughts momentarily a million miles—and five thousand years—away.

“Zero Perihelion Iridium preached that not only were digital and artificial intelligence perversions, and an offense to their deity, but that if the three aspects of being were thrown out of balance on a universal scale, then the Divine Ideal would never arise at all. As a result, Iridium urged the Iron Mass to adopt what he called the ‘lesser effort.’”

The way that she intoned the last words spoke volumes about her thoughts on the “lesser effort,” the syllables dripping with venom.

“The First Lesser Effort, led by Iridium himself, was the cause of the threshold to the Iron Mass’s home world being temporarily isolated. Members of the Iron Mass spread throughout the worlds of the Entelechy, preaching their peculiar brand of hatred, staging protests, and harrying synthetics, digital consciousnesses, and others of blended provenance. When the Iron Mass refused to stop harassing other citizens of the Entelechy, the Consensus convened and quickly decided to isolate the Iron Mass for a probationary period, their threshold enclosed in fullerene-reinforced diamond.”

Jida sighed, and her left hand fluttered briefly to her neck for only an instant, like someone suddenly afraid she’d lost a treasured necklace. But her fingers found nothing there, and she slowly lowered her arm.

“Fifty years later, the probation was lifted, and the threshold to the Iron Mass world was again opened. Time had not mellowed their tempers. Zero Perihelion Iridium had been a young man when the threshold was isolated, and as the result of the Iron Mass’s rejection of anti-senescence, he was now of advancing years. The Iron Mass had prepared themselves for the reopening of their threshold, and with their way to the Entelechy reestablished, Iridium launched what he prosaically called the Second Lesser Effort.”

The last words were choked out, like they were barbs caught in her throat, ripping her mouth as she spoke them.

“The Iron Mass managed to kill nearly a billion citizens before they were finally stopped. Nearly all of those who were killed were restored from backups, but as the Iron Mass had destroyed their interlinks along with their corporeal forms, there was a tremendous loss of memory. And the…the trauma…for those who survived the attacks was considerable and…lasting.”